A Policeman's Lot is Not a Happy One
by Lucillia
Summary: Despite the fact that the job was practically a sinecure, the Uchiha officers of the Konoha Military Police Force didn't just hang around drinking coffee and snacking on doughnuts. Even though they didn't particularly care for Konoha's other residents, they had a job to do. And, as a matter of pride, they did it well. Even when it took them to the darkest places...
1. Fugaku: A Study in Crimson

Most people in Konoha seemed to think a position in the Konoha Military Police Force was a sinecure. For some Uchiha who'd joined over the generations it probably was, but he'd done his best to remove anyone with that mindset before they could cause too much damage. Any damage to the reputation of the force would be a loss of face for the clan, as the two were practically inseparable in the minds of the villagers who had held them in suspicion since the Kyuubi attack. For him, even now, doing his best at his job as Chief of Police and putting away the assholes who thought they could commit crimes on his watch was a matter of pride. If there was one thing the Uchiha - especially him - weren't lacking in, it was pride.

How or why the force was founded, or whether or not it was to keep the Uchiha away from the village government as many Uchiha including him believed didn't matter right now. What mattered at the moment was the body on the ground in front of him. This was the third such that fit a rapidly emerging and exceedingly disturbing pattern that had begun in early September.

The girl who lay on the ground before him couldn't have been more than seven years old, an age when most children were starting the Ninja Academy like his son Sasuke had done recently. According to the information he'd received about the child however, the girl had been a second grade student at one of the small civilian schools that littered the village.

As he studied the child, his mind kept turning to Sasuke who was roughly the same age as the girl whose life had ended far too soon. The girl, or what was left of her rather, was flat on her back, lying spread eagle with her body sliced open throat to navel. Her wide, terror stricken eyes stared unseeingly at the sky, a look of fear being the last expression to grace a freckled face that would have been rather pretty if not for the circumstances.

Something about the girl's red hair and round face stirred a memory at the back of his mind, but as he tried to grasp it, it slipped away into the dark.

Whoever did this was a dead, he or she just didn't know it yet. He would personally hunt the perpetrator down and off that freak himself.

Having seen enough, he turned away from the body that was cooling in the early Autumn sunlight of the first morning of October and gestured for his cousin to bring the camera over and the crime scene crew to start scouring the scene for clues.

There were days that he cursed the fact that he'd been born into this job. He hated these cases.

**Edited 12-8-12**


	2. Fugaku: A Study in Crimson II

Fugaku sighed as he sorted through the files that were piled up on his desk. He could tell that today was going to be one of those exceedingly long days at the office. There was a good chance that he wouldn't be getting home until well after midnight considering how similar days had gone before.

When they had first gotten married, Mikoto had put her foot down and told him he wouldn't be bringing his work home with him where the children might find it, and he agreed with her. Itachi didn't need his love for the village tarnished with things like this, and his innocent little Sasuke wasn't ready to see some of the more horrible things that came with the life he had been born into just yet. He himself loved Konoha, but at times, quite a lot of the time in fact, he completely loathed its inhabitants, and not just because of the suspicious eyes they had been turning towards his clan for the last several years. Seeing the worst that people could do to each-other day in and day out tended to do that to a person.

Tatsukawa Noriko aged seven who had until the day before attended Konoha Elementary had been a rather well loved child from a civilian family that had resided in Konoha since the Founding. The family which lived in a lower middle-class neighborhood had no known enemies, and none of the girls teachers or neighbors could think of why anyone would do such a thing to the girl. Aside from the misfortune of having been killed in the manner in which she had been, she also had the misfortune of being the third child who had been found lying dead on one of the training grounds that were allotted to the Academy while the instructors had made their pre-dawn rounds to make sure everything was in order for the day. She was the second female victim, and the second victim to have red hair, which marked the middle victim Nakayama Hiroshi as an aberration in the pattern.

The only reason that he didn't mark the Nakayama boy as someone else's work considering this latest killing was because the way his body had been staged had been far too similar to the others to be mere coincidence. After being abducted and killed, all three victims had been placed out in the middle of one of the fifteen training grounds allotted to the Ninja Academy, the first having been placed on training ground 4, the second on 7, and the third on 5. All three children had been posed in the same manner, and all three children had been cut open from throat to navel.

Based on the forensics reports he'd looked over, the children had been killed elsewhere, and the crime scenes had been staged. A thorough search had determined that the criminal's tracks had been erased manually up until they reached a point in the village where they couldn't be sorted from anyone else's even with the aid of one of the better Inuzuka tracking dogs. After a careful study by one of the sensors in the department, it appeared that no jutsus had been used in the staging of the scenes, and all of the lingering chakra traces in the area that the sensor had been able to pick up had belonged either to the Academy instructors, the students, or the ANBU who had been assigned to watch the school and so far, all but the ANBU whom they had not been allowed to question had airtight alibis. Other than the placement of the body, the crime scenes had appeared to be completely undisturbed aside from the usual damage and debris that one finds on shinobi training grounds which told them absolutely nothing.

One thing that was clear however was that the perpetrator wasn't keeping the children long, as all of the bodies had been found before the children had even been reported missing. This was a good thing in a way, because that meant that the children hadn't suffered for too long before they died.

While it seemed irresponsible to not report a child that was out overnight missing on the surface, it was standard policy to wait twenty-four hours to file a missing person's report due to the number of false alarms that the police had gotten until the policy had been made in his father's day. Children in Konoha, even civilian children, tended to stay out late, even stay out overnight, and for the most part it had been safe to do so. Most often the missing child reports that the police had received had been for Academy students who had lost track of time as they trained until they collapsed, and they usually showed up back at home the next day after the Academy let out. But, the occasional civilian child would sneak out for the sense of adventure it gave them and would more often than not be picked up by one of the patrols that ran through the forests surrounding the village after having gotten lost. Some officers would agree to look out for missing children during their patrols before the 24 hour mark passed, but in this case as with the other two it would not have done any good.

Any number of requests for information from the village had run dry because nobody had seen the children get taken, or seen anyone suspicious hanging around the children before they were taken. This was frustrating because without any leads so far, they had been running around in circles like a rodent on a wheel and getting nowhere on this case. The lack of progress was exceedingly frustrating for him especially not only because of the fact that someone had been getting away with murder so far, but also because of the relatives of the victims who had taken to camping out near the station demanding answers from the police that they didn't have. Despite his dislike for most of the villagers, he hated looking into the eyes of another parent - a parent who had just had the misfortune of burying their child - and telling them that he didn't know who had done this or why it had been their child and not someone else's, or even why it had been any child at all.

As he was rereading the report on the first victim, Yamada Maiko, and hoping to spot something that he may have missed, Yakumi poked his head into his office.

"Chief, you've been in here for hours. Go home, the report will still be here in the morning." Yakumi said gesturing to the file that was open in front of him on the desk.

"Has the coroner's report on the Tatsukawa girl come in yet?" he asked in reply. It had been hours, but the victim's parents were still there waiting, and he still didn't have anything he could give them.

"Yes. Same as the others, nothing added, nothing taken, and no signs of sexual assault. Whatever this guy's doing it for, it isn't to fulfill some sort of sick fantasy, at least not one of that kind." Yakumi replied as he handed over said report which looked as if it had been leafed through several times already as was often the case when it came to one of the more difficult cases.

He sighed as he accepted the report. This was going to be trouble, he just knew it. The ones who did it for sex almost always slipped up somehow since they usually had a type and a necessary ritual that they had to complete. It was the ones who didn't do it for sex who were usually the hardest to catch, because they tended to kill indiscriminately, unable to stop killing off the field, having either gotten a taste for it or having broken from reality. The second red haired child could be part of a pattern as he'd initially believed, or it could be a coincidence, and she could have been just another child killed by a ninja who cleared his tracks out of sheer habit. He hoped and prayed it was part of a pattern. If it was part of a pattern the way it looked like, that meant that the perpetrator had a specific type beyond age, and with a type, he would be able to get a read on this guy. If he could get a read on this guy, he would be able to find him.

Hopefully this case wouldn't turn out like his other failures, like the other times that the perpetrator had escaped through either death or defection. The last child killer he'd tried to track down several years before had killed seven children in one of the lower income districts before he abruptly stopped, most likely having either been killed on a mission or gone rogue. The families of the young victims who had wanted closure, wanted answers, had railed at him for his failure, just as they railed at him every other time he had failed through no fault of his own.

There was still a good chance that it would end up that way though. In a world where death was around every corner, these kinds of cases had a tendency to taper off into nothing solid. More often than not, it was because someone spotted something wrong with the person responsible and dealt out a bit of friendly fire at the first available opportunity. That was if the Hokage didn't spot them first and send them on a suicide mission, leaving the crimes they committed within the village walls unsolved.

"You do know that tomorrow night's a meeting night, and if you don't get any sleep tonight..." Yakumi said, cutting into his reverie as he gathered up some completed paperwork.

He sighed and reluctantly put the files away in a specially sealed drawer of his desk, placing the coroner's report on top so he would review it first thing in the morning. After doing so, he exited his office and walked through the bullpen where several of his relatives and subordinates were hard at work on various tasks. After passing through the bullpen, he walked out the front door of the station refusing to answer any of the pleas for information that followed him down the street. Those parents, those grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, brothers, and sisters shouldn't know what he knew about those children's final moments. Nobody should remember their child the way they had been when he had first and last seen them.

When he was in charge of Konoha, nobody would get away with things like this. Not if he had anything to say about it.

**Edited 12-8-12**


	3. Fugaku: A Study in Crimson III

Fugaku snarled as he threw the rather misshapen coffee mug that Sasuke had made for him for his last birthday against the wall, shattering it. So far, today had been a particularly bad day in an already shitty week, and the news he'd just received took the cake. Instead of a single homicide like the previous four which included that of Sorachi Gintoki earlier this week, there had been a double, and it had to happen on today of all days.

For the last week, he'd been scrabbling on his little rodent wheel with an increasing sense of desperation and, as always, he'd gotten nowhere. Though they were rather uncommon in Konoha, the pair of hair colors that were part of the child killer's pattern weren't quite as rare as he'd believed them to be thanks to the number of immigrants that had come to Konoha over the years. Setting a guard on all of the children in the killer's preferred age range with those hair colors, or just bringing all of them into protective custody wasn't feasible. He didn't have the room or the manpower needed to keep track of them, and he couldn't ask his clan to take the children into their homes for an indefinite period of time. Aside from being a potentially useless danger, doing so would put those who took such children in in danger when the perpetrator of what was now six homicides realized that his victim pool had pretty much dried up and got desperate enough to attack in order to fulfill whatever scenario he or she was playing out.

Parents of children who were the killer's type had kept a closer watch on their children after a warning had been put out, but still, the bastard managed to get at them. Even dying the children's hair hadn't helped since the man apparently already knew which children had the hair colors he sought, and had removed the Sorachi boy's hair dye when he'd killed him.

After scrabbling around uselessly for so long, they had gotten to today where both a boy and a girl had been killed this time. On today of all days, there were two bodies waiting for him on Academy Training Ground 12.

After tasking one of his relatives to clean up the shards of the mug he'd destroyed, he went out to examine the crime scene. When he got there, he saw that both children had been laid out together, posed like the others. Unlike the others however, their heads were turned facing each-other rather than staring up into the ominous gray sky which had been threatening rain for most of the past week, and their hands barely touched, as if they had been reaching out to each other in their final moments.

Something about this and what day it was stirred something in the back of his mind, but like with that thing he'd almost grasped when he'd seen the third victim, he lost it before he could pull it into the light of conscious thought and possibly solve the case.

Like with the other killings, the children were a blond and a redhead. The slightly effeminate looking boy's hair had been platinum blond, and the girl had bright copper hair that looked and smelled like it had been chemically straightened very recently. With the number of curls remaining, it appeared to have been a rush job that had most likely had been done by the killer as neither a hair stylist nor the girl's mother would have done such a clumsy job. The latest male victim had been a member of a minor cadet branch of the Yamanaka clan named Ichiro, and it had been his first year at the Academy whose training ground he'd been laid out on. The girl, Hanataro Minami, had been the daughter of an employee at the bakery which was located two blocks away from the Uchiha clan compound, and he had seen her there on occasion when he went to get his wife's favorite rolls. Minami had been a rather cheerful and energetic child with wild curly hair which had flown about in every direction.

"With the way this guy's been going after blonds, I wonder why he hasn't tried to get his hands on the Kyuubi brat." Tekka commented from where he was taking photos of the bodies.

He'd prepared to snap at the man about his unprofessional comment when it hit him. Why not go after the Uzumaki boy? He was a rather obvious target considering, especially now. Why go after...Tomato?

Damn it, why hadn't he noticed until now that the girls had all borne a passing resemblance to the Uzumaki boy's mother? Why the fucking hell hadn't he seen it before? First a red haired girl, then a blond boy, a blond boy who was always dressed in that vaguely familiar white hooded sweatshirt with green stripes down the sleeves that the families of the victims always said didn't belong to the child, a sweatshirt he vaguely recognized as having seen a long time ago but hadn't placed until this moment.

Now that he thought about it, it was fucking obvious. But why at this age though? Why not go after someone older, closer to how old they'd been when they died? What was so special about this age?

If his wife hadn't been Kushina's friend, he would probably never have made the connection. The most likely reason he hadn't made the connection sooner had been because he hadn't really thought about them in years. Only those who had been closest to them had known, and Mikoto had been in their inner circle of friends. The only reason he himself knew was because of his wife's association with Kushina which had resulted in him being dragged on a couple of slightly awkward double dates. While he admired Namikaze Minato, he and the younger man had shared few common interests and had little reason to interact outside of official business aside from the dates their wives had dragged them on.

Whoever had done this was symbolically killing Uzumaki Kushina and the Yondaime Hokage, or possibly Kushina and her son. The mother and son scenario seemed to be a remote possibility however, based on the positioning of the bodies of the double which had to happen on this day of all days but, then again, could only have happened today considering who was being killed. Something about the positioning suggested lovers looking at each-other for one last time rather than mother and son, even though the son who was turning seven years old today fit with the ages of the victims.

Why though? What was the point in doing such a thing at all, especially now? Why now if ever? What was so special about this year as opposed to every other anniversary that had come before?

He stood there wondering what had been going through the killer's mind as one of the ANBU appeared before him in an unnecessarily flashy use of the shunshin, derailing his train of thought.

"The Hokage requests your presence." the masked man said before vanishing the way he came.

He swore as the man departed and for a good while afterward. The crime scene techs hadn't finished sweeping the scene, and that bastard had fucking contaminated it without a single thought for the evidence he could have tainted or destroyed, evidence that could have provided the identity of the perpetrator. Since this killing was unlike the others, it was possible that the killer might have slipped up, and that there could have been a lead here, a lead that they had lost due to the ANBU's negligence.

After venting a great deal of his frustration on a training ground that was well away from the crime scene, leaving it a mess that even Senju Hashirama would have been hard pressed to put back together were he alive, he made himself presentable and made his way to the Hokage Tower to see what the senile old man who could no-longer keep his opponents in check wanted. As it turned out, the reason for his summoning had been because the Hokage had needed his assistance.

Actually, what the Hokage had demanded was that he pull all of his men off of everything including today's homicide investigation to help the ANBU in their search. Apparently, one Uzumaki Naruto had gone missing. Considering what had happened today and four other times over the last month, the boy's current location was no great mystery to anyone. What was unknown however was the boy's current location, as well as the name of the person he was with.

He wouldn't be pulling his men off of the investigation they were running on today's double as well as the four others like the Hokage ordered him to however. Where the killer was, so too was the Uzumaki, either alive or dead, and those killings were the only clues they had to the man's whereabouts. Hopefully, if only for the Hokage's mood and his peace of mind, the boy would still be alive when they found him.

After being dismissed from the Hokage's office and making his way down to the station, he decided to act on his hunch regarding the killings being related to the Uzumaki boy's parents and ordered Yashiro to compile as list of people who had been close to both the Yondaime and Uzumaki Kushina, starting with their surviving Academy classmates. The only thing he could think of as to why the killer had waited until this year to carry out his grim task was because the Academy was important somehow, and this was the year that the Uzumaki had started the Academy.

In Konoha, outside of one's team and one's family, the people that a shinobi tended to associate with most were other shinobi starting with former teachers, former teammates, and former Academy classmates in that order. Only someone who had been close to Namikaze and Uzumaki would have known to associate the two as husband and wife, and most likely the perpetrator fell into one of the latter three groups.

If Yashiro had thought his request unusual, he didn't comment. The other man had seen many of these odd leaps of intuition pay off over the years that they'd worked together.

**Edited 12-8-12**


	4. Fugaku: A Study in Crimson Conclusion

After the list of names he'd requested had been compiled, a team was sent out to interview those on the list and attempt to determine their guilt or innocence. The door to the rather nondescript house he was standing in front of would be the third door he'd knocked on since he had joined the team that was hunting down the Yondaime's former classmates. There were a surprising number of them still alive considering the number of shinobi that had been lost during the last war and the Kyuubi attack. When one included those in the years directly above and below the Yondaime and the Uzumaki's class as well as the dropouts, there was a list that was long enough that it needed to be split up and divided amongst the members of a sizable team in order to be dealt with in a timely manner especially now that time was of the essence.

After a few moments of knocking, one of the village's numerous career Chunin answered the door. Nothing about the man's behavior stood out to mark him as a definite suspect rather than merely a potential one, but since the man was a shinobi, that was to be expected. The man showed signs of guilt and fear, but that too was to be expected. Everyone had something to hide, and having the head of the police force show up on one's doorstep tended to make one conscious of what it was that they had done that might give the police cause to visit one's home. The person he was looking for would most likely give themself away by suppressing all reaction to his presence.

"May I help you?" the man asked.

"The Uzumaki boy slipped his minders, and has gone missing and I've been tasked with searching for him." he replied, trying to show only the irritation he would have felt upon being given said task this had been the usual situation with the boy rather than what was really going on today.

"You haven't seen him recently have you?" he asked, scrutinizing the man's reaction which had contained the normal amount of antipathy towards the Uzumaki.

"No, I have not, but I'll be sure to keep an eye out for the brat and inform you if I see him." the man said, and all of his instincts told him that the man was telling the truth, and he'd learned to trust his instincts long ago.

As he turned and continued on his way, he'd idly noted that the man had reacted to the mention of the Uzumaki boy the same way most of the villagers did, which was strange, considering the fact that by all accounts he'd been friends with the boy's mother. Shelving that thought for later, for when he had time to think about it, he made his way to the next address on his list.

An hour later, he'd visited the last of the houses on his section of the list and hadn't come up with any viable suspects. Disappointed, he returned to the station where all of the others who had been visiting the Yondaime's former classmates informed him that their searches didn't pan out either. Not wanting to lose what seemed to be his only lead since it had been the most promising one he'd had in a while, he told Yashiro to compile a list of anyone either Namikaze or Uzumaki had served on a team with when they were Genin that was still alive.

He hoped this wasn't going to be another fool's errand like the last list had turned out to be. Back when the Yondaime and his wife were inducted into Konoha's forces, it had been a time of war, and while Namikaze and Uzumaki had both had only one Jounin instructor apiece, the Genin on their teams were in a state of flux, and that didn't even include when they they themselves were temporarily filling gaps on other teams while their instructors were out on missions of their own. The list that Yashiro had been ordered to make could potentially have more than a hundred names and addresses on it.

After what had seemed like an interminable wait, a new list which even included the Jounin squad leaders for teams that the Uzumaki or Namikaze had served alongside more than twice during joint missions had been compiled, and he was back out there again. It was late at night as he began to make his way through the village once more, the moon was high, and according to his watch, it was already October 11th.

This puzzled him somewhat because there hadn't been even a hint of a rumor of the Uzumaki boy's corpse having been found while they'd been waiting around for a lead. If the killer had decided to go big and have the Uzumaki boy join his parents like this morning's double homicide had indicated he would, would it not make sense to leave the Kyuubi Jinchuriki's body to be found in an exceedingly public place at the hour of the Kyuubi attack which had already passed?

He spent several hours puzzling over this as he made his way down the list, waking people up as he went, and it was nearly dawn by the time he'd finally reached the home of Tada Nakamaru who had served on several joint missions alongside Namikaze Minato's team. After about a minute and a half of knocking, the door was answered by a man he'd seen around the village any number of times. The only reason the man stood out in his memory in particular was because he was always friendly towards him when they ran across each other. Not friendly in the sycophantic sort of way that people who wanted something from him were, nor with the forced politeness people such as shopkeepers outside of the compound had, nor with the air of someone who is afraid of what would happen to them if they weren't, but genuinely friendly, as if the thought that he might have set the Kyuubi on the village seven years ago had never occurred to him. These days, that was quite the rarity, and he had found it somewhat refreshing.

If he remembered correctly, the man had been forced to retire from his ninja career at the end of the Third War after he'd suffered some sort of injury during a mission. Based on the way the man limped when he led him inside to sit down as none of the others he'd woken in order to question them had done, his memory was almost certainly accurate in this case.

After following the man down a short hallway, he had been led into a living-room which had been floored with carpeting rather than the more traditional tatami mats and furnished in a style that had been somewhat popular two decades ago, with the available seating being a couple of rather clean and comfortable looking if slightly elderly sofas. On one of the sofas was a lump under a rather brightly colored afghan that he assumed to be the man's child. Though why the man let the kid sleep on the couch and risk ruining it rather than send it to bed where it belonged, he didn't know.

As he prepared to seat himself on the couch that wasn't occupied by his host's offspring, the afghan covered lump shifted, and a spike of blond hair poked out from the edge of the blanket, a spike that was of a particular shade of Sun Yellow which held very faint hints of red in it that only one denizen of Konoha possessed. He didn't even stop to think before he reacted, and got a kunai up just in time to block the one with which his new prime suspect who had seen what he had seen, and known that he knew had tried to stab him. The fight that followed was short since the other man was both slower than he and suffering from injuries that had never fully healed, and the man was soon felled with a fatal wound that was not immediately so.

"Why?" he asked as he looked down at the dying man. That question had plagued him throughout the entire case, and now was his last chance to know the answer.

"To take what was owed to me." the man said before coughing up blood. "I killed them, and I killed them, and I killed them, and I took from them what they took from me."

"But, why kill the Yondaime?" he asked, knowing that to this man the blond boys he had killed had all been Namikaze Minato. He understood what the Yondaime Hokage and Uzumaki Kushina had supposedly taken from the man since the evidence was on the couch, but neither Namikaze nor Uzumaki had struck him as the type who went around killing children if it wasn't part of a mission.

The man laughed coldly before coughing up more blood.

"All of you stupid bastards seem to think that the Yondaime was some great hero," the man said before coughing up even more blood, apparently nearing his end. "Sacrificing his life for the" cough "village and and all that crap."

"The bastard was cleaning up his own damn mess." the man managed to choke out between coughs, his voice growing fainter as he grew closer to his demise. "That whore of his was the Kyuubi Jinchuriki. Giving birth messed up the seal. I overheard..."

The man died before he could finish whatever it had been he was saying. But, he'd gotten his answer though. It wasn't a satisfying one, nor was it one he could share with the grieving parents of the children the man had killed in his insane quest for retribution considering certain S-class secrets such as that of the Uzumaki boy's parentage, but it was an answer nonetheless.

He'd always hated these cases. When it wasn't about sex, the ones responsible for the crime almost always turned out to be insane. There had been no black or white, good or evil this time either, no matter how much he'd wished that there had been.

As soon as he was a hundred percent certain that his fallen opponent was dead, he turned to his secondary mission objective, the one that he'd been given by the Hokage. The boy was asleep and, to all appearances, he had been asleep throughout the entire altercation. That was good since he didn't know how this situation and the revelation that had been made in front of the child who was obviously ignorant to what had been happening would have affected the child's precarious mental health had he been awake to witness it.

After he had turned the Uzumaki boy over to the Hokage and gone down to the station to inform the parents who had begun arriving for their daily vigil that the person responsible for the deaths of their children had been dealt with and write his final report, he received the final answer as to why Tada had waited seven years to take what he'd seen as his revenge. Tada's daughter had been seven years old when she had died the night the Kyuubi had attacked Konoha.

The man had both symbolically killed the Yondaime and his wife when they were at the same age as the daughter who had been taken from him had been, and had claimed their son for his own in payment for the death of his daughter when he had reached the age that his daughter had been the night of the attack.

As for why Tada had let him into his home, the man had known on some level that it was over since the first killing, and had chosen suicide by cop rather than public execution as the means of his demise.

And, that was why he hated these cases. Like several cases before it, no matter how hard he had tried, true justice had not been served.

**Edited 12-8-12**


	5. Obito: Two Weeks in Hell

Obito sighed as he shifted his aching leg to a more comfortable position. Here he was, thirteen years old, and he was moving like an old man thanks to an injury he'd received during his last mission. While he hadn't been forced to stay in the hospital for any length of time, he had been taken off of the active duty roster for two weeks which was almost as bad. After his sensei had sent him home telling him to hold off on training for a while, his father and his uncle had decided that rather than lazing about around the house while he recovered, he should be doing something useful with his new-found free time, and he had been duly assigned to a temporary posting at the station until he was returned to active duty status. He had been given the desk of one of the rare female recruits who was currently out on maternity leave to work at until he left since he couldn't run patrols with his leg the way it was, and had been told that due to a certain lack of personnel, they wouldn't be holding his hand while he tried to figure out what the heck it was he was supposed to be doing here.

Back before the war, this place had been a crowded and exceedingly busy hive of activity. Now, with very few who could be spared from the battlefield for any length of time, the KMPF station was virtually empty. The few who were here in the bullpen alongside him were here because they too were on medical leave, some of them indefinitely. A cousin of his who didn't seem to share the popular opinion that he was a nuisance at best and a disgrace at worst was learning to get by with two fingers missing from his dominant hand after having fallen victim to a particularly nasty trap three weeks ago since there hadn't been time to retrieve the fingers, much less re-attach them that day. Another cousin who had lost a leg last year was on duty as a file clerk.

Until he was deemed fit enough to return to the field, he himself was here to fill out reports and file complaints on the behalf of local citizens, as well as whatever else those who were actually officers rather than temporary substitutes told him to do. So far, that had mostly been to act as a gofer.

Right now, he was writing up a report on an open and shut case against a drunk guy who had tried to steal a street sign that was currently sleeping it off in one of the holding cells. He had been at it for over an hour, since the paperwork involved was different from the forms he usually used when he was making mission reports, and doing paperwork hadn't been his forte in the first place. The general lack of activity was making it hard for him to focus on his task as well since he'd always been the sort who ran around and did stuff.

Being stuck behind a desk was practically torture, hence his abysmal scores on the less practical subjects at the Academy. If it hadn't been for the war, he probably wouldn't have graduated until he was like fifteen considering the number of tests he'd bombed and all the homework he'd missed.

"Put that away for later. We're going out on a case." his cousin Yagami who was hiding his left hand in his pocket, probably so he wouldn't have to see it said, startling him because he hadn't been paying attention to his surroundings.

"A case?" he asked warily. So far, in the two days he'd been here and the two times he'd been told he was going out on a case, what had followed had been anything but fun or exciting. After dragging him out into the field, his cousins had laughed at him while they had made him hunt down a shoplifter and a drunken sign thief.

"Yeah, someone's grandmother wandered off." Yagami said. "Since you're always helping the elderly, this should be up your alley."

He groaned as he got up to follow his cousin who, despite previously being nice to him, had turned out to be like all the rest. He couldn't wait until the two weeks were up and he could go back to doing missions with his team. At least then he'd be getting it from one direction instead of a dozen.

**Edited 12-8-12**


	6. Obito: Two Weeks in Hell II

As he traveled through the village trailing after his cousin, Obito shivered slightly, wishing he had his jacket as the warm Spring weather that was due to show up any day now according to the old-timers who had been watching the signs had yet to appear. If he could, he would be wearing his jacket right now but, he'd been ordered to wear the uniform, which was basically the standard Shinobi uniform aside from the KMPF logo on the sleeves where the Uzu spiral was usually located for the two weeks that he was assigned to the KMPF. In order to meet the standards of the KMPF dress code, he'd been forced to undergo the expense of purchasing a new Chunin vest, as he'd outgrown his old one since he last wore it on the day he got it as Minato-sensei had been a bit more relaxed about the Shinobi dress code when it came to his team, and had pretty much let him wear whatever the hell he wanted while on missions as long as he didn't turn up naked. In contrast to Minato-sensei, Fugaku-sama hadn't been nearly so understanding.

Today was not a good day to be out, especially if you were wearing an outfit like the one that the missing old lady had been described as last being seen in. There were small signs that Winter was giving way to Spring everywhere you cared to look, but Winter's grasp on the world was still a strong one. It was February after all, less than a week after he'd celebrated his thirteenth birthday by pulling a prank on that stuck up bastard Kakashi which had left Minato-sensei laughing until he had tears in his eyes.

Kakashi may have been on the fast track for being Jounin, but that didn't mean that the rule obsessed boy out-ranked him yet, and he wasn't going to let his teammate get away with acting like he did so until he actually did. When he got off medical leave and was back with his team that was.

Back in the old days before the war, the days he could barely remember, when he'd wandered into the station looking for his father and found it to be a buzzing hive of activity, a thirteen year-old wouldn't have been given any position whatsoever in the KMPF, much less the one he was taking now. Now however, most of the patrols were being run by Genin while the more experienced members of the clan did what they could to make sure the station didn't collapse into complete disorder before the war ended and things got back to normal. The only reason he wasn't currently on patrol with the Genin at the moment was because he was injured.

He wasn't injured so badly that he couldn't walk, and that was why he was going out on these small fry cases while his older, more experienced cousins were tied up with managing the patrol routes or other more important things. The incident with the shoplifter had been quickly resolved when the moron had been caught trying to steal from a store that was run by a retired shinobi. By the time he and his cousins had arrived, it had been a matter of rescuing the hapless shoplifter from the shopkeeper. The would-be sign thief that he'd been forced to deal with next had rather quickly been found passed out on his loot in an alley near the street in question. This case would be slightly more difficult however if only because the amount of time it would take to search the village and the surrounding woods for the old lady in question while hobbling around on crutches so he didn't strain his injured leg too badly and end up being stuck on medical leave for even longer. The search would go faster if he could take to the trees and rooftops, but he couldn't in his condition.

One of the things that made his current task more difficult was that while Konoha was called a village, it could probably be more accurately described as a small city. It probably had been a village when it had been founded more than fifty-five years ago, but in the intervening decades it had grown. This meant that there were literally thousands of places where an old lady who was reportedly senile could hide, and it could take days to find her, days that the old lady didn't have in this weather. If she hadn't died of hypothermia or run afoul of one of the traps that had been set up to deal with intruders already that was.

An hour into the search, one of the patrolling Genin raced over and started begging him and Yagami to come and help deal with some sort of disturbance in one of the local parks.

"...and Shisui doesn't know what to do with her either, so I came and got you..." the boy who had been out of breath moments before said as he continued his rather rapid explanation of the situation.

Apparently their old lady had been found, and for some reason only known to her, the old woman they had been searching for had set up a small fire in the park, and had camped out next to it. When someone had tried to move her from her little makeshift camp, she had objected violently, and neither Shisui nor his companion were sure exactly how to deal with her, as they didn't want to harm her since she was a fellow Konoha citizen, and they couldn't think of a way of removing her from her campsite that wouldn't harm her that hadn't already been tried and failed. The boys she was defending her campsite from were also afraid that rendering her unconscious through means of a sedative or even a quick and careful blow would kill her considering her advanced age. All attempts at putting her to sleep through Genjutsu had failed.

When he and Yagami reached the park where the old lady had been holding the young Genin at bay, Shisui - who had just made Genin and had been put on patrol duty when he wasn't training with his team - was clearly at his wits end, and anyone who could have helped the poor boy had taken up the position of observer since "it wasn't their problem now that the police were here to deal with it". The old woman who was dressed in a thin short-sleeved nightgown that only reached her knees and what appeared to be a pair of toilet slippers was holding the boy off with a kunai that she had somehow acquired in her wanderings. Based on the way she was holding the kunai, it was clear that she was a retired kunoichi, which wasn't all that surprising considering the fact that she was from a minor cadet branch of the Senju clan, and looked to have been a full-grown adult at the time Konoha was founded.

Though he was somewhat nervous and off balance and uncertain as to what to do, he moved forward knowing that he should be doing something to help Shisui. The woman who'd been keeping Shisui at bay sensed his approach and moved to defend herself from him. As he watched her move towards him ready to defend herself, he noted that some things clearly moved past the conscious mind and into the realm of instinct when they were used often enough. While, by all accounts, the woman couldn't tell what day of the week it was, much less what year it was, she still knew how to move like a ninja.

"Um, Senju-san, do you think you could put that away?" he asked nervously, after dodging out of the way of the woman's first strike.

The woman paused at this, and studied him for a moment, as if she was sure she'd seen him somewhere before, but couldn't quite place his face. After a minute or so, recognition seemed to dawn on her.

"Kagami-kun?" she asked, almost hesitantly.

He hesitated, wondering exactly how he should respond to this. It wasn't every day he got mistaken for his grandfather after all. If he replied in the affirmative and she realized he wasn't Kagami, the situation could spiral out of his control and things could get dangerous right quick. Ninja learned early on to be wary of potential impostors, and even with her mind being the way it was, she would eventually catch on to the fact that he wasn't Kagami. While he greatly resembled his grandfather, the two of them weren't identical.

"No ma'am, my name's Obito." he eventually replied, having come up with a plan on the fly which he hoped and prayed would work, but seriously doubted would do so. "I came to tell you that your relief is here, and that you can stand down and go home now."

Taking his cue, two of the ninja who had been standing around watching the scene as if they'd had nothing better to do moved forward to take the roles of the woman's fictional replacements. This ploy seemed to work however, since the woman lowered her kunai and moved into a more relaxed stance.

"Home..." the woman said vaguely. "Yes, It'll be good to be home."

After standing down, the woman gave them no further problems until they reached her doorstep. The door had been answered by a woman who was maybe twenty-five years of age who was either a civilian, or more likely a semi-retired kunoichi based on her movements. Upon seeing her, the old woman they'd retrieved stiffened up and started backing away. Yagami caught her though, and helped bring her inside the house.

"Thank you for finding my grandmother Uchiha-san." the woman said as he helped the old lady who looked like she didn't want to be there get situated.

"It was no problem." he replied, wanting to be gone as soon as possible. The situation had been embarrassing enough, and he wanted it over with as quickly as possible. He had the feeling that he would be receiving a great deal of ribbing over his solution to the problem that had stymied Shisui and his patrol partner when he got back.

Sure enough, as soon as he got back to the station, he was greeted with the laughter of his cousins, including little Shisui who'd spent more than half an hour trying to figure out how to deal with the situation he'd fixed before he got there, but it didn't bother him as much as it usually would because he had something else on his mind. It had been while he was writing up his report that he realized what it had been that had been bothering him since he'd dropped the old lady off at her house. The old lady had a large number of scars, which was to be expected considering her former career but, the burn scar on her arm had looked way too new to have been gotten during a mission and way too old to have come from the fire in the park. He should know, just about every Uchiha had several of their own.

**Edited 12-9-12**


	7. Obito: Two Weeks in Hell III

Obito sighed as he made his way through the village to a place he wasn't sure he would be welcome at. The last week had been exceedingly frustrating and had contained humiliation after humiliation, but none of that had anything to do with where he was going at the moment. Well, one of the denizens of that particular dwelling had been the source of some of the teasing he'd received, but aside from that, where he was going had nothing to do with the humiliation he'd been forced to suffer through for the last seven days.

The fact that Yagami had liked him hadn't stopped him from picking on him like the others, including little Shisui and his diminutive tag-along Itachi who was barely able to string a full sentence together. In addition to the shoplifter, the sign thief, and the old lady, he'd been forced to hunt down three dogs, a cat, a runaway from the orphanage, and a guy who ate and ran at a couple restaurants, and he'd been forced to resubmit the paperwork on the sign thief twice since he'd filled out the forms incorrectly. To top it off, he'd nearly dislocated his shoulder when he'd slipped and fell in the bathroom while climbing out of the tub two days earlier, and his leg which hadn't stopped bothering him for the entire week had been keeping him up most of the night every night.

Throughout his exceedingly crappy week, he hadn't been able to get that old lady out of his head. If he wasn't thinking about her in spare moments between tasks, he was having nightmares about what it would be like if he survived to reach that age himself. He had stopped and told himself several times a day that he'd most likely been imagining things when it came to the cause of old lady's injury. The burn on the old woman's arm could very easily have come from a prior camp-out that the police hadn't been dragged into, and the woman's reluctance to stay at her granddaughter's home could stem from the fact that it wasn't the home the old lady had lived in in whatever time frame her mind was lost in, which was most likely sometime during the First War considering the fact that the woman had mistaken him for his grandfather. There was no reason to believe that anything else was going on.

Still, he couldn't shake the feeling that there was something wrong with the situation.

That morning, as he had been preparing himself for yet another day of frustration at the station, he had decided to check up on the old woman and put his mind at ease. As soon as he had been given the lunch break he hadn't been certain he'd get that day considering the amount of work that had been piled on his desk when he'd arrived that morning, he made his way to her home. When he finally arrived, the woman's granddaughter answered the door, though he could hear a couple of small children that hadn't been there the week before in the background.

"How may I help you Uchiha-san?" the woman who didn't seem all that happy with his presence asked when she answered the door.

"Um," he said, feeling somewhat embarrassed since people didn't generally drop in to visit strangers. "I was in the neighborhood, and I thought I might drop by and see how your grandmother was doing, if that's okay with you."

It apparently was fine with the woman since she led him inside her home, and to the small room in which Senju Hanako aged somewhere around 75 or so lived. The room was painted in neutral colors and traditionally furnished. Since he couldn't see a bed, he assumed the old woman slept on a futon which was currently put away for the day rather than one of the other styles of bed which had become more popular in recent years such as the bunk bed he had shared with his older brother. The room smelled of old lady, which was to be expected considering its inhabitant. Hanako herself was sitting in a corner fiddling with something which on closer inspection turned out to be a piece of ninja wire.

"I don't know how she keeps getting into my equipment." Hanako's granddaughter said as she snatched the piece of ninja wire away from the woman. "One of these days, she's going to kill herself while I'm not around. Today isn't a very good day for her, so I don't think she'll realize you're here."

Despite the advice of the old woman's granddaughter who was currently out on maternity leave, he tried to talk to her anyways. She was too lost in her own little world to respond though, and hadn't even registered his presence in the room. After a while, he gave up, thanked the granddaughter for letting him see her, and left.

As he made his way back to the station and the remaining paperwork that had been piled on his desk since Yagami hadn't wanted to deal with it because his hand had been bothering him, he found himself pondering the fresh looking bruise on the old woman's face that he'd noticed during his recent visit. Such an injury could have easily been gotten in a fall, and old people fell over all the time. But, on the other hand, there had been the rough manner in which the granddaughter had taken the ninja wire the woman had been fiddling with. Then again, the younger woman was probably concerned that the old lady would hurt herself with the ninja equipment she was absent-mindedly messing around with, as was often the case when one negligently toyed with things that were meant to be used as weapons. There was no reason to suspect the worst.

Feeling slightly guilty for both suspecting a fellow Konoha ninja, and what he found he was planning in order to put his mind at ease, he decided that he would watch how the granddaughter treated the old lady when she didn't think there was anyone watching. He was reasonably certain that he could make sure that she didn't even know he was ever there despite the fact that they were both Chunin and she the more experienced of the two. As Minato-sensei had once said, if hiding were a sport, he'd take the gold medal every time.

Odds were that there was nothing untoward going on in that home and that he was imagining things, but he felt that he had to know for sure, and that was why he had turned up at the old lady's granddaughter's home on the day off that Fugaku had given him after he'd learned that everyone had been giving him their paperwork to do. Getting into the home uninvited had been easier than anticipated. He'd gone in in the middle of the day while the old lady's granddaughter and her children were out at the park rather than during one of the hours one would expect a thief or a prowler or another such undesirable such as a brat who should be minding his own business rather than breaking and entering to enter a home. There had been fewer traps around the house than were usual for a shinobi residence since there were small children who could get into them living there, and there was a perfect hiding place for him at the top of the closet in the old woman's room.

As he settled in to watch and wait, he noted that the old woman had been left at home unsupervised, but since she seemed to be sleeping, that didn't necessarily mean that she was being neglected. After several hours, during which the old woman had gotten up and had aimlessly wandered about the house for a while, the granddaughter and her children finally returned. From the sounds of activity he could hear from his perch in the old lady's closet, the granddaughter had put down some groceries that she had purchased while she and her children were out before leading the old woman back to her room, and shutting the door. After a while, he could hear and smell dinner being prepared. As the meal was being made, he prayed that the growling of his empty stomach wouldn't give him away.

Eventually, the granddaughter came in and got the old woman for dinner. As soon as the meal ended, the old woman was returned to her room. As the granddaughter opened the closet and got out the old woman's futon which smelled as if it hadn't been properly aired out in a while, he held his breath and silently prayed that the woman wouldn't notice the Genjutsu that was hiding him from her sight. As soon as the futon had been laid out, the granddaughter who was as yet unaware of his presence bade the old woman good-night and shut the door, shutting him in with the old lady.

He remained in his hiding place waiting for an opportune moment in which he wouldn't be caught leaving by the residents of the home he'd broken into to depart. As the night wore on, the old woman grew increasingly restless, and eventually got up. Soon, he could hear her wandering the house checking the windows, locks, and traps as her granddaughter had done before sending her children to bed, and as his own father did every night. This apparently either disturbed the granddaughter's slumber, or disrupted some other quiet activity the younger woman had been engaged in because a minute later, the granddaughter forcefully dragged the old woman into her room.

"You are supposed to be in bed!" the granddaughter snarled as she forcefully shoved the old woman onto the futon.

He'd seen enough. His suspicions had been confirmed, and now that they had been, he was going to do everything he could to rescue the old woman from her situation. As soon as he was certain that the granddaughter was asleep, he dropped the low-level Genjutsu which had kept both him and his Chakra signature hidden and left his hiding spot. After packing a bag with a number of the old woman's belongings, he went to the futon and gently shook her awake.

"Senju-san," he whispered when the woman finally focused on him. "I'm going to get you out of here."

Getting the old woman up and dressed seemed to take forever, and he grew increasingly nervous with every passing minute he was in the house with the Genjutsu down. All it would take to cause his hastily made plans to crash and burn would be for the granddaughter to wake up and realize that someone besides her relatives was in the house, or for one of the granddaughter's children to wake up and find him leading the old woman away. He knew of a place where the old woman would be comfortable, but he couldn't get her there if they got caught, and the old woman was moving so incredibly slowly...

After what seemed like an eternity, he and the old lady were out the door and on their way, with him thanking every deity he could think of that they hadn't been caught in the process. Had he been caught, it would be his cousins answering the call, and it would be his word against the granddaughter's and he'd only seen her shove the old woman. Since he'd been hanging around the house without the family's permission, trouble would have been the least of what he would have been in. Now however, the old lady was safe, and no-one would hurt her again.

**Edited 12-9-12**


	8. Obito: Two Weeks in Hell Conclusion

After removing the old woman from her granddaughter's care, it had taken Obito a full day to realize that he'd technically committed a kidnapping. Even though his intentions had been good, chances were that others wouldn't see his removing the old woman from her home as the rescue it had been. If, or more likely, when he got caught, it would come down to his word against Hanako's granddaughter's, and all he'd seen were a burn scar and a bruise that she could have gotten anywhere, and the granddaughter being a little rough with her but not causing her any injury that he had noticed when he'd helped her dress for the day the morning after he'd removed her from her home. When that day came, it would be him who was in trouble, him who was arrested, him who was stripped of his rank and put in prison for his actions.

While the bolt hole which had been used as a supply cache by his clan back near the founding of the village that was now as Hanako's new home hadn't been bothered by anyone but him and his older brother in years, there was a chance that it wasn't as forgotten as he believed it to be, and that someone would find Hanako while he was away. That led to another problem. Because of the work he had to do during the day, he couldn't be around to provide all of the care that the old lady needed, and the situation regarding his absence would only get worse soon considering the fact that he'd soon be off medical leave and taking missions in the field. While he would never intentionally hurt the old lady, neglect could be just as bad or worse than anything that Hanako's granddaughter would have done to her. At least the woman was actually around most of the time.

He wished Minato-sensei were here, since he'd know what to do. Minato-sensei, Kakashi, and Rin were out on a mission without him though, and it would be several days before his sensei returned. If he returned. Before his team had left, they had told him that they would be back by the time his medical leave was over, but during times of war, things happened. He hadn't received any news that they had been hurt or killed, but that didn't really mean much because with the covert sabotage missions they had been taking, it could take days or weeks before anyone realized something had happened to them.

Worrying about the old lady had distracted him from his worries about his team for a while, but with her somewhat dealt with, his worry for his team who would have been able to help him for this situation had begun to return full force. Over the next several days, during which he had waited for his sensei and his teammates to return and worried himself sick over both their absence and the possibility that he'd be caught in regards to the kidnapping of the old lady who had once again been reported missing at any moment, he took every opportunity to check up on Hanako to make sure she was fed and tended to. Since he'd taken care of babies during D-ranked missions, the slightly ickier parts of elder care didn't come as as much of a shock as it would otherwise have done to a boy his age. He didn't like it, but it had to be done, and since he'd taken on the responsibility of tending to the old lady, it was up to him to do it.

Each time he visited the old lady to tend to her, he found himself looking over his shoulder the entire way there, afraid that someone would follow him for whatever reason, and find out what he'd done. So far, nobody had bothered to see what he was doing, even if only to gain ammunition for whatever barbs they wanted to hurl at him next but, that didn't mean that nobody would.

On the fifth day since he'd removed the old lady from her home, while he was at his desk at the station, a familiar looking blond arrived.

"I've come to report a missing person." the man said with a bright smile when he reached his desk. "One of my students seems seems to have vanished and been replaced by a police officer."

"Minato-sensei!" he cried happily as he practically leaped over his desk in order to hug his teacher, truly glad to see him.

If his sensei was in such a good mood, it meant that his teammates were alive and well as well. They weren't standing there with their sensei, which in the case of Kakashi wasn't all that odd, but in the case of Rin was somewhat unusual. When one of the members of the team was left behind due to an injury however, both of those who had been uninjured usually tried to visit that team member the instant the mission was over. Rin was more apt to do so than Kakashi was however.

"Come on, lets go get lunch." Minato said, smiling brightly.

"I would, but..." he started, wondering how or even if he should tell his teacher about what he'd done.

"But what?" Minato asked, looking slightly apprehensive, as if he didn't want to know what sort of idiocy his student had been up to while he was gone.

"Not here..." he finally said, giving the officers that surrounded him a furtive glance.

As soon as they reached an isolated training field where they'd more than likely not be overheard, the entire story spilled out, from the moment he'd met the old lady at the park to the day he'd kidnapped her. After he'd told the story which had left his sensei staring at him at a loss for words, he brought his teacher to see the old lady while he brought her her lunch.

"I'll help you until you make a decision about what to do with her." Minato said with a sigh as soon as the visit was over. It was clear that his sensei didn't entirely approve of his actions, but what was done was done.

Despite what his sensei had said, the decision about what he should do with Hanako was taken out of his hands two days later when he and his team had received a mission assignment Despite the fact that Minato-sensei had done his best to keep them away from the battlefield and on the slightly less risky sabotage runs, they were being sent to the front. He didn't know what he would do with the old lady while they were gone, especially if the worst happened on the mission, because he couldn't just return her to the granddaughter who hurt her after he'd gotten her away, and he didn't know anyone he could give her to who wouldn't return her to the woman who had hurt her. After deliberating on this for a long while, he told his sensei as much.

"We'll bring her with us." Minato said after several minutes of silent contemplation on the problem.

"But we're..." he started, wondering why his teacher would make such a decision. The front lines were no place for an old lady. She could get hurt or worse.

"I know." Miinato said. There was a peculiar look in his eyes as he said it.

All too soon, it was time to go and they left for the front, moving at a pace that accommodated the team's newest and slowest member. Both Kakashi and Rin complained about the exceedingly slow pace at which they were moving the entire time but, Minato-sensei always silenced those complaints rather than turn back and return the old lady to the village as they had repeatedly suggested. Fortunately, the old lady didn't wander off along the way, and cause even more problems or an even bigger delay.

They eventually reached the front lines, though they did so much later than they would have had they not been hindered by his burden. While most of the war was fought guerrilla style with hit and fade attacks being carried out in enemy territory, larger battles involving Samurai and foot soldiers as well as ninja often would and did break out. The battle he and his team would be participating in was just the latest in a series of battles over a hotly contested piece of territory that had been fought over for years. Neither side had managed to hold onto these few square miles for more than six months at a time.

After reporting in, they prepared themselves for battle. Something seemed to come alive in the old woman's eyes when Minato-sensei handed her his spare vest, a hitai-ate, and several weapons the minute they reached their comrades at the front. Hanako shrugged the vest on without assistance despite the fact that she'd constantly needed his help to dress, armed herself as if she had been doing so forever, and tied the hitai-ate around her neck the way she had done in the one picture he'd seen of her from around Konoha's founding, back when his grandfather whose Genin team had run some missions alongside her Genin had been a small child.

He started to say something when he saw her standing there dressed as if for battle, but his sensei silenced him with a look. All too soon, the fighting in their area picked up, preventing him from questioning his teacher, and it was time for him and his team to join the battle. Hanako joined in as well, showing the same skills she had shown on that day at the park over two weeks earlier. He did his best to keep her safe as she fought alongside him and his teammates, but they were eventually separated in the chaos.

After what seemed like an eternity, the battle finally ended for the time being, and he was finally able to search for her. After searching for a good long while, hoping that she'd just wandered off somewhere, he eventually found her. She lay near where he and his team had been fighting, surrounded by the corpses of the enemy. It was obvious that she had gone down fighting until her last breath.

Minato-sensei found him sitting next to her body and crying an hour later.

"Why?" he asked his teacher when the man sat down next to him.

Why had his teacher brought her here to die, and why had he helped him?

"Because, sometimes the best we can hope for is to die with dignity." his teacher replied.

**Edited 12-9-12**


	9. Yashiro: Benefit of the Doubt

"Should've arrested him when we had the chance." was the first thing Uchiha Yashiro said when he'd run out the door to see what the commotion was only to find Fugaku's firstborn Itachi running amok and slaughtering everyone.

He didn't think too much of his chances against Itachi considering the pains that came with his age which had slowed him down considerably. For a civilian, forty-five was pretty much at the dawn of middle age. Forty-five was when civilian parents watched their children get married off one-by-one. Forty-five was when civilians started welcoming their grandchildren into the world. Forty-five was when civilians began to seriously think about the retirement that was only fifteen or twenty years away.

For a shinobi in any era, forty-five was practically ancient. Reaching forty-five in such a high risk field was considered either a sign of cowardice or quite the accomplishment depending on the reputation the shinobi in question had earned over their career. In this era, forty-five meant that the shinobi in question had managed to survive the last two world wars. For shinobi who tended to live fast and die young, the grandchildren were often half grown as they considered such things by the time they reached forty-five. By forty-five, most shinobi were either dead or retired.

Yashiro, who incidentally was forty-five, had seen action in both the Second and Third wars, and had loyally served in the Konoha Military Police Force for nearly three decades when he wasn't out on the battlefield. Over those years, time and injuries - including the ones he'd recently received from Itachi and was still recovering from - had slowed him down, and he was well aware of the fact that he was no longer the young Chunin at the start of his career who may have been able to keep up with the Clan Head's son.

A confrontation between Yashiro and the prodigy of the Uchiha clan could have only one outcome.

As Yashiro lay dying, bleeding out from a fatal wound that was not immediately so, he swore at himself for not pressing Fugaku further on the issue of Itachi's arrest despite the fact that the man was the Head of their clan. He'd learned long ago not to give someone the benefit of the doubt because they were Uchiha...

&!&!&!&

**Author's Note**: For those who don't know, Yashiro was one of the three members of the KMPF who went and confronted Itachi about Shisui's suicide note. According to the Narutopedia website, he was 45 at the time.


	10. Yashiro: Benefit of the Doubt II

Yashiro had faithfully served the Konoha Military Police Force for more than twenty years but, the day he'd made what he would later consider to be his greatest mistake during his career had been during his first year on the force. Back then, the Second Shinobi World War had been in full swing, Fugaku's father was nearing the end of his tenure as both Chief of Police and Head of the Clan, and young Fugaku was out making a name for himself on the battlefield. The White Fang and the Legendary Sannin were out making their reputations on the battlefield as well, but Yashiro had been stuck guarding the home front as he recovered from an injury he'd received early on in the war.

At that time he'd been somewhat bitter as he watched his age-mates and even those younger than him who had passed him by making names for themselves, viewing his new position on the police force as something he'd been relegated to rather than the honor he'd later come to realize it was. As a result of his bitterness, he hadn't taken his work nearly as seriously as he should have, and that had been his first mistake.

The day She'd come in, he had been the only one who hadn't been busy at the moment, but that had mostly been because he'd just come in off of patrol and hadn't yet gotten himself situated at his desk. Before someone had gotten the bright idea to put Genin on the patrols during what otherwise would have been their free time, those who had been holding down the fort while almost everyone else was at war had been pulling double and even triple shifts, running patrols on one, and dealing with all other work on the other(s). The work had been practically never-ending since there weren't enough people at the station to deal with it as more and more came in every hour. Paperwork bred like rabbits and never seemed to be completed, and everyone was tired and short tempered as they tried to tame it.

She'd come in early in the morning when he'd been preparing himself a cup of coffee as he got ready to tackle the mountain of paperwork pertaining to a possible homicide which he'd been investigating that had been piled up in his inbox overnight. In any other situation, She might have been attractive, but hadn't been then. From the looks of it, She had only barely taken the time to get dressed before she'd run to the station, as Her clothes appeared to have been hastily thrown on. She looked like she had been crying for hours. Her eyes were swollen and puffy, and there was snot dripping down Her nose. A bruise had been forming along Her jaw as well.

When he'd seen Her, the first thought that had come to mind was that it was another Domestic case. During times of war, people tended to be stressed out more than usual, tempers ran hot, and domestic disturbance calls increased as ninja who were on leave started taking things out on their families. The first case he'd cut his teeth on had been a domestic call. Quite often, these cases ended in tragedy, further reducing an already undermanned shinobi force.

It hadn't been. She had come to report a rape. Not only had She come to report a rape, she had accused a member of the Uchiha clan of being the perpetrator. Following what he did next and the fall out that came after, he had spent the rest of his life regretting how he had handled that case.

Back then, he had been aware of the fact that rape had existed. He'd heard stories about what foreign shinobi had done to kunoichi on the battlefield. But, he'd been raised with the naive view that such things didn't happen inside the village, a view that he'd rather stupidly held until his early twenties. Along with this naive view he'd been raised with was the fact that his father had been one of those people with the view that most claims of rape were made by women who regretted having sex the morning after which he had passed down to him along with a number of stories about women making false claims against the Uchiha in order to tarnish the reputation of their clan.

It had been these factors that had caused him to take the case far less seriously than he should have. After filling out the report, he'd basically hustled Her out of the station, and had gotten back to what he'd seen at the time as a more important matter.

Her report sat neglected for the rest of the shift, and all that night after he'd gone home, gotten dinner, and caught some sleep. He'd only followed up on it the next day because he didn't want to be yelled at for not following up on something so serious and, even then, he'd done a rather half-assed job of doing so. Rather than trying to corroborate Her story through other means, he had gone directly to the man She'd accused, a man who was his second cousin on his mother's side of the family, and asked for his side of the story.

His side of the story had been pretty much as expected, he'd met the victim in a bar, they'd got to talking, and drinking together, and she'd invited him back to her place where they'd spent the rest of the night. She'd never said no, and he didn't know why she had claimed he'd raped her afterward.

With the accused being family, his story had held more weight in his mind than the alleged victim's had, and he had dropped the issue then and there.

He shouldn't have...

**Edited 12-9-12**


	11. Yashiro: Benefit of the Doubt Conclusion

They found her body three days after I'd gone to visit my cousin to get his side of things, and it wasn't clear whether the cause of her death had been homicide or suicide. He'd been amongst the first on the scene since he had spoken to her the day She'd made Her accusation against his cousin, and he'd encouraged his fellow officers to mark the death down as suicide since the only person he could think of who would have had motive to kill Her was his cousin, and his cousin wouldn't kill a fellow Konoha citizen.

This was yet another mistake that he would come to regret for the rest of his life.

By covering up the cause of Her death, he'd basically told his cousin that the police had his back and that he pretty much had a get out of jail free card that would allow him to do anything he wanted. His cousin's other victims who had seen the man get away with rape as well as what had happened to the one who had been brave enough to come forward, were cowed by this and held back in fear. With nobody coming forward, his cousin had been free for far longer than he should have been, and it had only been a matter of time before the man lost restraint closer to home.

Even to the day he died, he would never know why his cousin had chosen his younger sister. It could have been because he had dared to question the other man after he'd been accused of rape rather than letting it slide, because he had been the one who had taken her report when she had shown the courage to be the first one to report his cousin, or it could have merely been because he'd wanted her, and he'd been taught that he could take whatever he wanted without consequences when he had committed an act that had the direst consequence attached and completely gotten away with it thanks to him. Whatever the reason, his younger sister had become his cousin's first and probably last victim within the clan.

The first sign that anything was amiss had been when he had come home from a long double shift to find his younger sister who had been fifteen at the time hiding in her room crying. At the time, he had foolishly thought that it had been because of some childish heartbreak since her mission had gone well and her entire team had come back alive, and left her to it. Over the next several days before she went out on another mission, he'd noted a change in her behavior that he'd been equally dismissive of. She'd refused to eat, and had sat picking at her food when he'd forced her to come to the table, and had wasted a large quantity of water taking in the upwards of five showers a day. She'd also gone out of her way to avoid him whenever possible, and cried herself to sleep at night.

Back then, he'd figured that she had gotten into a fight with her boyfriend and broken up with him and put the issue out of his mind after resolving to have a talk with the young man. He ended up having a brief talk with the boy a few days after his sister left on her mission only to discover that his sister had abruptly broken up with him for no apparent reason, and after sharing a drink with the boy he'd asked him to try to make up with his sister, because he didn't like to see her moping about the house.

When his sister's strange behavior continued upon her return from her mission even after her boyfriend had presumably attempted to make up with her, he became concerned, and decided to have a talk with her. At first she refused to say anything, but when she finally started to speak, the story she told stunned him. It wasn't just the fact that she had accused his cousin whom he'd thought had previously been unfairly accused that left him speechless, but also the fact that many of the details of her story were identical to those that had been given by Her several months earlier.

After his sister had finished telling her tale, he'd rushed off angrily to confront his cousin. In reply, the man had sneered over the fact that he hadn't cared about his actions before he'd let his sister get hurt without even once trying to protect her, and the fact that it had taken this long to learn what had happened. He'd seen red at that point and ended up killing the bastard.

It had taken five men to restrain him after he'd killed his cousin, and he'd ended up spending a couple nights in jail afterward. But, instead of being tried for the murder of his cousin, he had been released after several women came forward on his behalf, finally ready to talk since his cousin no longer held the threat of death over their heads. While nothing could be done to get justice for the women who'd been raped by his cousin since the man was dead, their testimony had provided enough evidence to prove that he'd been acting in defense of others and had secured his release. He had been allowed to return to his job after a thorough debriefing, which some of his relatives had thought was far more than he deserved.

All of that had been too late for his sister though. When he had left her side to go confront their cousin, she had hung herself knowing that she would be shamed by the rest of the clan, and possibly the rest of the village for what she had "allowed" to happen to her. As he stood at his sister's graveside following her funeral, he had vowed to do a better job, and to never give anyone the benefit of the doubt, even if they were family.

Many years later, as he lay in the street in a pool of his own blood listening to the screams of the dying that surrounded him, he reflected on the fact that every time he had given a member of his own clan the benefit of the doubt, he lost someone close to him. The last time, it had been his sister, this time, it had been his entire clan.

**Edited 12-9-12**


	12. Tekka: Amongst the Eaves

You see plenty of strange things while on patrol in Konoha, especially along the rooftop routes. Those who frequently hang out on the rooftops tend to form their own little community where the line between ANBU and Military Police tends to get blurred and each will go to the defense of the other if the situation calls for it. In the course of my duties for the KMPF which include a wide variety of tasks that range from crime scene investigation to foot patrols, I've been semi-regularly patrolling these rooftops for nearly three years, and I have come to know any number of people during that time.

When I told Itachi yesterday that he wasn't the only Uchiha with ANBU connections, it wasn't merely an idle boast. Over the time I've spent policing the upper levels of Konoha where pretty much only shinobi go, I've known members of both sides of ANBU, official and Root, as well as any number of couriers, insomniac shinobi, and roof rats. I've dodged everything from Exploding tags to banana cream pies during my patrols, and have avoided any number of traps and pranks that have been set up by the Uzumaki in order to catch the unwary.

Tonight's domestic disturbance which involves flying kunai doesn't even faze me. I've seen it all a hundred times before, and from the same couple no less. For us, it's the typical Saturday night in which they blow off some steam, and I bring them down to the station for a few hours until they cool down so they don't accidentally kill an innocent bystander with a stray kunai.

I am Uchiha Tekka, and this is my story.

**Edited 12-9-12**


	13. Tekka: Amongst the Eaves II

Considering how much time I spend up here, I can honestly tell you that life on Konoha's rooftops isn't all fun and games. Any number of tragedies have played out amongst the eaves and around the chimneys and air conditioners including a few I've personally witnessed, but there are times when I prefer the rooftops to the ground where I am both loved and hated, but now mostly hated for being a Uchiha. Up here where lines blur and manners often fall by the wayside in an easy camaraderie amongst those who spend most of their time above Konoha which currently sleeps below, I'm Tekka, as in "Hey Tekka!", "Hi Tekka", "Another long night again Tekka?".

In the winter when it's freezing out and the rain is pouring down, you don't turn down an offer to share a warm cloak or a bit of shelter from the elements. This closeness that the denizens of the rooftop highway share as they wait for the inclement weather to pass often creates an intimacy that the societal standards of Below doesn't really allow, especially for one such as I who must always be mindful of my actions because they reflect on my clan as a whole. Up here, in rain or shine, we all belong to Konoha, no matter who we are.

This closeness between those who spend most of their time above the streets sometimes has its consequences however, such as what had happened to one child that I had befriended. It had been on a cold and rainy night during my first year with the KMPF that I had met a Root recruit who hadn't been much older than the Uzumaki boy is now, and I can tell you that either Shimura Danzo's operating budget is strapped for cash or the man is a skinflint. Unlike I who had been properly attired for the weather and had a rather nice warm cloak which had a waterproofing seal that actually worked, the kid who'd been standing on a roof I'd been walking along to complete my second circuit of Green Route 3 had been dressed in in standard ANBU attire. Standard ANBU summer attire that was.

It was understandable that the kid had been a bit skittish when I'd decided that that rooftop was a good a place as any to wait out the storm and that my cloak had enough room to accommodate a little brat who had been soaked to the bone as well as myself, considering the fact that I was a strange man who, in offering the boy shelter, could also very easily be trying to lure the child within arm's reach for other purposes. Eventually, as hypothermia began to set in, the boy who was probably either studying the movements of the normal ANBU so he could better pass himself off as one of them or had been sent outside for some sort of sadistic cold weather survival training finally took me up on my offer.

The furtive glance that the kid gave me as he looked at the cloak I had offered to shelter him under showed that he clearly knew he wasn't supposed to even be thinking about it but, I wouldn't have told on the boy were I asked point blank by his master since I was breaking the rules then myself. I was supposed to be on patrol right then, not standing there next to a vent from an apartment complex's furnace which was providing me with some extra warmth that I hadn't realized I'd needed until my hands had started to thaw out. But, it was one of those nights when even the criminals knew to stay indoors.

Practically without warning, the boy who had been giving me cautious glances from behind his mask scurried over to me and planted himself next to me beneath my cloak, getting me damp in the process. The kid was skinny, but had the wiry strength that was common amongst recent Academy graduates, and easily fit beneath my cloak with me. We stood there until my patrol ended, but fortunately, the rain had let up and the kid had pretty much warmed up and dried off by then.

That had been the beginning of a friendship that had ended in tragedy, which was pretty much the only way a friendship with someone in Root could end. Despite being completely loyal to Konoha, and training his recruits to be unswervingly loyal to the village as well, Shimura is a mean bastard who only allows his recruits to be grateful to him and only him since he believed anything else would compromise their training, if it could be called that. Anyone who didn't meet his standards or follow his rules to the letter was cast out of Root.

The thing is, nobody makes it out of Root alive.

If I'd known what was going to happen, I would have given the kid a few pointers on surviving a night such as that one had been and gone on my way instead. It hadn't been my intention to get the kid killed, and I learned my lesson afterward. Nowadays, I tend to keep a bit of an aloof distance from the others in Root rather than risk them getting killed for being more than mere acquaintances who greet each-other when we run into each-other. I will not be the cause of another child suffering the fate of that nameless boy if I can help it.

The destruction of Root is my price for participating in the coup when the time comes.

The time for the coup is not now however, and therefore I continue to patrol the rooftops as I likely will after the coup takes place. I'm not particularly highly placed in the clan, and while I'll be amongst the village elite like I should be since I'm Uchiha rather than spat on for my supposed role in the summoning of the Kyuubi, I'll also still be a shinobi the day after the dust clears and our victory is announced, and it will still be my duty to serve Konoha in whatever capacity I am asked. Since I know all of the rooftop byways like the back of my hand, I will likely be asked to continue patrolling them like before.

Though it is my preferred route, I don't always stick to the rooftops. In the course of my duties for Konoha and the KMPF, I've been down on the ground dealing with crime scenes, and I've been in the office taking reports and filing paperwork, but for the most part, the rooftops are the domain of myself and a few others in the clan who run these routes at different points of the day. It will likely remain that way until the day I either retire or die, whichever comes first. While I want to retire and live long enough to see the kids I plan on having grow up and meet my grandkids, I understand that as a shinobi my life is unpredictable, and death will probably come first, even though I spend most of my time in the village patrolling above its streets.

I shouldn't keep thinking about coup or my possible demise however, that is the future, and now is now. It is a clear and beautiful night, the moon is nearly full, and the stars are shining, and I need to bring a certain couple in before their bout of playfulness turns deadly. Even though I've caught them dozens of times before and could practically do it in my sleep these days, I shouldn't let my mind wander. There is a chance that I'll end up getting myself killed doing so. The kunai that are flying about at the moment are live, and they are being flung by fellow Chunin after all.

**Edited 12-9-12.**


	14. Tekka: Amongst the Eaves Conclusion

I smile as I look up at the night sky and breathe the night air, happy to be back on patrol. It's been several days since the usual Saturday Night Domestic, and after playing office drone for a while, I'm back on the rooftops where I belong. While being in the office is nominally a good thing since it places me under my Chief and Clan Head's eye, giving me a better chance at promotion if I do well, I hate it. I prefer to be outside breathing the night air as I make sure that the village I was born into, the village I serve is secure. The summertime rhythm of run, leap, run, leap is soothing on this night when the very air feels wrong.

I'm not the only one who feels that something is seriously off. The roof rats are hiding in their nests, and the greetings of my fellow rooftop travelers are subdued. They can all see like I can that moon is full tonight even though it shouldn't be. I've been watching the phases with half an eye, and I know for a fact that the moon should be three-quarters full at the most. Whatever it is, it can't be Genjutsu, because my Sharingan which I've held active my entire shift, even though it's inadvisable, and I'll end up dropping from Chakra Exhaustion the minute my shift is over can't pierce it.

Like the silent roof rats who are hiding on a night when they'd usually be active, visiting their neighbors and calling out the occasional greeting as I pass, the wrongness of this anomalous full moon fills me with an inexplicable dread. The silence from the roof rats who are usually a rowdy bunch in the warmer months frightens me as well. Thanks to the ominous moon that seems to be staring down at the world waiting to strike, they're all hiding tonight, and there aren't any of the normal sounds of greetings, laughter, and squabbles over food or choice sleeping spaces in the places they usually haunt.

As I near the half-way mark of my route, a passing courier makes a superstitious sign from a foreign religion that has caught on in some of the more remote areas of the country as he looks at the sky. He shivers as he does so. I find myself copying the gesture, hoping to ward off whatever evil is lurking in the darkness seemingly waiting to devour me. The Root brat who is standing guard over the entrance to their little bunker over near the market gives me a strange look as I pass, a look that isn't the usual unemotional neutrality that is standard amongst their ranks. It chills me more than the oddly ominous full moon, and the unnatural feeling in the air.

As I near the end of my patrol happy to be heading into the station for once, there is a keening noise from the seal at my collar. It is the General Alert calling back all who are out in the field. Based on the modulation of the tone, I am to make my way back to the compound rather than the station I'd been headed towards posthaste. One of my cousins who has received the alert as well races by my side after he nearly running into me on the way back. Like me, he often patrols above the streets but, he has the counterclockwise patrol on the other side of the village.

Every once in a while when we both have the same night patrol shift, we would both meet in the middle where our routes overlapped and trade greetings that are as old as the clan. It is a comforting ritual that we do not have time to observe on this night as we frantically race towards the place we've called home since the Kyuubi destroyed the houses we had grown up in.

As we near the compound, I can hear screams. They're muffled at first, as if that strange bone white moon above has swallowed them whole, and as I look up at the moon, I find myself believing the old story about how it is the body of a dead demon who had been far more fearsome than the Kyuubi for the first time since I heard it as a child. The instant I vault over the wall, which is something only a Uchiha or someone who's feeling particularly suicidal can do, the screams become louder, unbearable even. People are dying all around me, and it is the Clan Head's eldest who is doing the killing, or at the very least, someone who has made themselves look like him even under the Sharingan somehow.

I stare at the scene around me in shock.

This can't be happening. This can't be happ...

Wondering why they had been closed in the first place, I open my eyes. The compound with its screams and dead bodies is gone, as is the unnatural moon that had so frightened me. I'm standing at the beginning of my patrol. As I round the first circuit of my usual route, the rhythm of run, leap, run, leap is soothing as I push away what had undoubtedly been a nightmare. Based on the sounds of the village below, it's Saturday Night. Going by the position of the stars above, I've started my shift later than usual thanks to that horrific nightmare and I will have to hurry if I want to break up the usual Saturday Domestic.

After running flat out for nearly seven minutes, I find myself at a position near the fighting couple who have obviously been at it for a while.

"Hey, hey, break it up!" I yell as I dodge a kunai.

They usually know better than to throw one in my direction since I tend to add to the fine they're charged the next morning if they do so. The usual fines for the Public Intoxication and the Drunk and Disorderly charges were exorbitant enough without tacking on a charge of Assaulting an Officer.

Rather than stopping with the kunai throwing and going into the usual He said, She said with me like they almost always did at this point, the couple completely ignore my presence and the kunai continue to fly. She slips, and a kunai that would have missed her goes straight into her, stabbing into something vital. The death that I'd been half afraid would happen, and had always gotten there in time to prevent was now seemed to be a certainty. Neither he nor she seemed to notice when I raced to her aid, and no-one answered when I called for help. Things only started moving when a patrolling ANBU came by five minutes later to find the male half of the duo clutching his dead wife and sobbing.

I blink. The scene is gone, and I'm at the start of my patrol. Based on the sounds coming from Below, it's Saturday night. Based on the position of the stars above, I'm late, very late. I run to where the usual fight is, hoping to prevent the disaster I undoubtedly dreamed like I had dreamed the full moon under which Death had stalked the clan compound. The couple isn't in their usual spot however, and there are no sounds of fighting nearby.

Perhaps one or both of them had a mission tonight.

Thrown, I continue with the usual patrol. The Uzumaki child is on the roof of an apartment building setting up a rather ingenious prank that's undoubtedly meant for Monkey with whom the boy has a particularly antagonistic relationship. For some strange reason the boy looks larger than I remember him being. Smiling since Monkey would be owing me one, I sneak over to sabotage a critical component of the boy's trap. The boy frowns as the ninja wire goes slack and turns to look at me.

There is terror in the boy's eyes. Not the "Oh crap I've been caught by the cops!" terror that most people who are in the wrong tend to exhibit, but true, unadulterated, start screaming your head off before curling up in a ball in the corner terror.

I blink. I find myself standing at the beginning of my patrol route. Based on the sounds below me, it is Saturday night.

My name is Uchiha Tekka, and I think I might be dead.

**Edited 12-9-12**


	15. Setsuna: The Enemy of My Enemy

How far would you go for someone you hate, someone who under ordinary circumstances you'd be happy to see dead because it meant that your enemies numbered one less? I Uchiha Setsuna nearly died for such a person. I had done it more for my clan than the person in question but, since I nearly died saving the person in question, it pretty much was all the same in the end.

Many would think me monstrous for having hated a child as much as I had that one but, what I hated about the child was everything she was and everything she represented aside from being a child. The child whom I had hated and for whom I had risked my life was a Senju, and to a Uchiha who still remembered the days before Konoha, a Uchiha who had lost family to the Senju during the endless wars, a Uchiha who was determined to get out from under the Senju thumb and be respected as he would have been in the old days that was more than enough.

Back in the days when Konoha was seeing the first generation born in the village rising to the ranks of ninja and the Konoha Military Police Force had been newly founded by a Nidaime who was mourning his brother's recent death, there had been a case that had nearly ripped the young village apart, and it had been my duty to solve it. I who would have been considered a traitor by the new Hokage had he known of my plans to help my clan take their rightful place in the village hierarchy had been tasked with discovering the fate of a Senju child.

What had happened was that one of the pudgy little civilian mites had gone missing while ostensibly going berry picking in the woods but, more likely, while playing ninja with her friends as she had been forbidden from doing by her mother who was determined that her daughter would become a shopkeeper in this new and more "peaceful" world. After a thorough search of the forest had failed to turn up a lost and frightened child and the dredging of the local ponds and lakes had failed to turn up a drowned one, and evidence was discovered that pointed to a possible abduction, the case had landed on the desk of the Chief of Konoha's new Military Police Force who was also Head of the Clan, being nephew to Izuna and Madara through their older sister. After giving the stacks of paperwork that were already piled up on his desk a baleful glare, the Chief had handed the file to me with orders that my personal and political views which were well known to the clan be left out of it.

Back in those days, there hadn't been any color photography, and the brief description of the child that accompanied the sepia toned photograph that had come with the file was that of a rather average brown-haired brown-eyed Senju child except for the fact that the girl weighed nearly twice as much as her mother would've at that age. The missing child in question was seven years old at the time of the incident, and the face that stared out of the brown and white picture which had been taken upon her entry into the local civilian school was heavily rounded with "baby fat" which spoke of a lifetime of being completely spoiled in a way that neither the Senju nor the Uchiha could have imagined for any of their children even fifteen years before, spoiled in a way that the entire first generation of children born within the walls of the village had been.

There was nothing particularly special about this child other than the fact that she'd gone missing. Sure, there were people who loved her, but she wasn't wealthy or important and, aside from Uchiha like him, her parents had few if any enemies. All in all, she was just an average child who had gone missing as children were wont to do on occasion. Missing in a way that suggested that the photograph would be the way the parents would want to remember their child when or if she was eventually found.

In the early part of the case before I saved both my enemy and my clan, I had set out thinking that I was merely hunting a predator, not the would-be destroyer that I had ended up facing in the end. And, on that quiet summer afternoon in which children weren't playing as their parents were keeping them indoors out of fear of what could be lurking in the woods, I had thought it just as well that that which I was hunting was thinning the herd of the Senju. The only reason I hadn't written off the case entirely and done little to nothing back then despite my Chief and Clan Head's admonition was because I wasn't entirely certain that the predator would limit itself to thinning out only the Senju. After having successfully picked off a member of one of the better clans, it could become bold enough to test the Uchiha, and might manage to take one of the Uchiha young before it was taken down if I didn't do something to stop it before it could.

It had been for that hypothetical youngster that I had set out to slay the monster, and it had been a Senju child that I had eventually saved, and in so doing I had saved my clan from a plot from which it may never have recovered. The Nidaime was suspicious enough of us already, and it had been for that reason he had kept us away from the village government and thrown us a bone in the form of the Police Force. If the Senju had thougt we were going around killing their offspring however...


	16. Setsuna: Suspicion and Enmity

Back in those early days of the First Shinobi World War, the days of the Nidaime when the Konoha Military Police Force was getting its start, the village had been a different place. Many second or third generation Konohoans likely wouldn't have recognized it as their home if it weren't for certain landmarks that had been there since before the founding. The village was a bit rougher for one. That, and the apartment buildings which gave Konoha a more urban feel had not been built yet, and neither had a number of the shops which lined the streets spreading out from the original marketplace.

Back then, Konoha had looked and felt like a number of the smaller towns and villages that were scattered throughout the backwoods of Fire Country, part of the reason why the village that was more of a minor metropolis by the time the final generation of the Uchiha were born kept its artifact title of "ninja village", but there was still a feeling of potential in the air that was almost palpable. In the nearly eighteen years since the village had been founded, it had nearly tripled in size as houses that had not been built by the recently departed Shodai Hokage had rapidly sprung up in the sizable space between the cliff and the walls that marked the boundaries of the land that had been granted to the Senju and the Uchiha and their followers by the Fire Daimyo.

The woods surrounding Konoha were a bit wilder back then as well, since there had been only one generation of shinobi tromping through them rather than four or five, and it was into those woods which had been practically trampled by the Senju and their allies that I started my search. Back in those days, the local children tended to go into the woods to play ninja because there was more cover, and despite the uncertainties of the war which had recently started that was causing parents to keep their children closer to home, many parents let them.

When I reached the sun dappled clearing that was a favorite play area amongst the Konoha children in order to get a good idea as to how someone might have taken the Senju girl without anyone noticing, it was only to arrive to find that it was occupied. Instead of playing under the watchful eye of the Chunins who occasionally volunteered to check in on the kiddies now that there was a war on, the usual scrum of Konoha bratlings were all crowded around one, no, two beings.

Standing in the clearing was none other than Senju Tobirama, and in his arms was his brother's infant granddaughter. Based on the content of the chatter coming from the children that surrounded him, the man had been asking questions, questions I myself should have been asking. Despite the fact that the man had said he'd trusted us to investigate when he gave us the case, the bastard had been doing my job for me and investigating on his own. This had stung more than my professional pride that day. If I had thought I couldn't hate the Shodai Hokage's brother any more than I did that morning, I had been mistaken. The feeling that had sprung up in my breast upon spotting the man who completely dismissed me as he did what was supposed to be my job because he'd given it to me had to have been at least a dozen times hotter than what I had previously felt when I'd encountered Senju Tobirama before.

The only thing that had kept me from doing something suicidal at that moment was the knowledge that I had to find that Senju brat's kidnapper before one of my own was taken, Tobirama be damned. Swallowing back the anger until it was a small burning ball in the corner of my mind, and a vague burning in my chest, I walked up to the Nidaime and introduced myself as the officer who had been put on the case. As I did so, the air grew frigid, seemingly dropping twenty degrees in a matter of seconds. I honestly don't know if it were him or me that was the cause.

While Hashirama's brother talked a great game about cooperation, he obviously didn't believe a single word he said, unlike Hashirama who had so strongly believed that people, even people who'd been his enemy moments before couldn't help but follow him. With Tobirama, like most Senju from their generation and older, there was a look that stated that too much has happened for it to ever be forgiven or forgotten and we both know it. Considering the fact that the Uchiha gave the Senju a similar look, that was to be expected. About the only times a Senju and a Uchiha born in what was now starting to be called the Era of the Warring Clans worked well together was when the village they'd worked so hard to build was being threatened.

It was only in the current generation that Uchiha and Senju played together, and even then it was usually a somewhat awkward affair because the children had picked up on the tension between their parents. More often than not, when one saw a child from the Uchiha playing with children from outside their clan, the children they were playing with would most likely be from one of the other clans that had settled in the village such as the Sarutobi, the Shimura, or the Nara.

In fact, I could see one of my younger cousins standing in a small knot of children that contained the offspring of civilians and one of the newcomer Yamanaka.

After the initial "pleasantries" were over, I got down to business. What Tobirama had managed to glean from the children was pretty much what I already had, which was nothing. Nothing, nothing, and even more nothing followed when I interrogated the children who'd been interested enough in what was going on that they chose to remain rather than wander off and play elsewhere while the adults attempted to sort out the business of the missing child.

Seeing as the girl had been popular enough amongst her peers, the odds of one of the kids having killed her and covered up the murder, especially in this more genteel age when children usually don't kill until after they'd graduated from the new "Ninja Academy", were rather slim. Watching the children's behavior as I interrogated them, hoping I'd luck out and discover that there wasn't a predator after the children, but rather a child who'd gotten a bit too much of a taste for blood, I didn't spot any of the warning signs I'd learned to spot as a child. All of the warning signs that would alert one that a child needed to be put down because they'd just as easily kill off the battlefield as on were completely absent from these strange and innocent little creatures that the village was raising.

Eventually, the Nidaime who had other work to get to because he had a village to run departed, and most of the other children left with him, apparently finding him more approachable than usual since he was holding a baby. Normally, the more prickly of the two Senju brothers wasn't a child magnet, but little Tsunade's presence had apparently made the brats who used to trail around the far more approachable Hashirama prior to his demise that much bolder.

Looking around the clearing that had been trampled by hundreds of little feet since the predator I was after had absconded with his prey, I found a spot where a child could be grabbed should those with her be particularly inattentive, and examined it looking for a potential route which would allow one to depart from the area almost entirely unnoticed. When I found one I would've taken if I'd snatched a child the size of the one that had gone missing, I prepared to follow it in search of a possible trail.

I had almost leapt into the trees when I had sensed someone attempting to quietly approach me from behind. Whirling around with a speed which hadn't dulled in my years away from the battlefield, I turned to confront my potential attacker, pulling a kunai from my pouch as I did so. I soon found myself face to face with my now very startled young cousin who looked like he was about to wet himself in fear.

"I-I-I..." the child who was rapidly backing away from me with something in his hand that definitely wasn't a weapon stammered.

"Well, speak up." I said sternly, attempting to cover my embarrassment at overreacting and nearly attacking another member of my clan.

"I-I didn't tell him, but I found this while I was playing." the boy finally said, standing his ground outside of arm's reach of me and holding out a small strip of blue cloth.

I took the cloth from the boy's hand, and upon examining it, I immediately knew why the boy hadn't handed it to the Hokage. The subtle pattern of lighter and just so slightly darker threads was a trademark of one of my clan's better weavers. A weaver who had yet to let go of old enmities, and exclusively served the Uchiha. While it could mean nothing, especially considering how well frequented the woods were for everything from children's games to illicit trysts, there had been a possibility that whoever had taken the girl had been a member of my clan.


End file.
